Category Archives: Peepholes

The Holy Trough

We turn on the holographic projector that we nicked from Admiral Ackbar in the confusion of the Endor post-victory Orgy (so many furries!) to display the Strange Planet whose charting is our cultural rover’s ultimate purpose. We gloss over catalogues of artefacts and genealogies of sound.

We identify a disturbance in the force, a void in our cartography. A mountainous and wild zone where we have in the past sent envoys well versed in the arts of diplomacy, dance and arm-wrestling, and that’s all she wrote.

As Artificially Intelligent as these minions are, they are not the best at dealing with unexpected scenarios and fuzzy categories. Those things that cannot be said clearly, you see, they have trouble parsing those things: The mysterious, the sexual, the deadly, the irrational.

Which means that, this time, we need to do the job ourselves. We download our consciousness into a baseline body and infiltrate the uncharted zone, guided by pigmy scouts with pointy teeth and pointier spears. They were raised in the pummelling gospel of drum music, they could come in handy.

Zoom in.

Picture us playing a sandpit first person shooter in a level concepted by Andrei Tarkovski, implemented by James Cameron and fucked up by China Mieville (in other words, Avatar done right). Playing it on legendary, rocking those checkpoints.

To begin with, a culturally complex discotheque whose atmosphere renders the trajectory of drum-beats visible, and their sound distorted in a way that optimises their feverish dance allure.

We lost the pigmies in this Martin Reverie.

Then, down the bottom of a cliff from where the pop tribes hurl their misfit spawn. Mutant magic wolf children who whistle the sweet melodies of utopia while surviving a night to night which is red in tooth and claw.

We slugged for jesus in this quagmire. We ran out of ammo. The cracking of our guns and the drone of our knife missiles fed into the never-ending musical composition which is the ambient of this place.

We arrive at a clearing illuminated by the last embers of a dying bonfire, stalked by presences big and lumbering like spillage from a Maurice Sendak nightmare.

Are these leviathans on the prowl, imperial dreadnoughts, godly ectoplasms or riotous inmates at the EBM asylum?

We cannot see, but we can hear. Their bellowing and sirens, oscillations and chanting mark the steps of Peepholes’ geometric progression. A curve which bounds this weird region where we are now trapped, its psycho-geography an embodiment of all we look for in music = Myth & Trance.

This is also the point when we realise that we are never coming back home, for this is home.

Peepholes are perhaps the best band in the UK right now, together with Factory Floor & Cold Pumas (NB we are waiting for Teeth of the Sea & Mazes’ new album, and Vision Fortune’s debut). The Overspill!, is being released by Upset the Rhythm in November. It is incredible. You can pre-order it here.

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopaedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right. – Umberto Eco

The 20jfg bestof lists attempt no such feat of greatness. We are as confused by the infinity of stuff out there as any being. It’s fun to look back at our best of lists in retrospect, and i guess in this way they are cultural documents for ourselves, which we hope you also enjoy.

This is our final bestof lists for 2011 – we probably missed some of the things we loved, and you loved so let us know any in the comments box.

Mind Over Mirrors: I’m Willing to Stagger Bursting forth with a droning, lackadaisical klaxon rippling through the heavens, I’m Willing to Stagger twists and distorts its tape delayed harmonium into something completely off-worldly. Mind Over Mirrors has managed to recreate that lost La Monte Young soundtrack to the birth of the universe. A huge pounding piece of processional music that locks you into it’s footstep grove as hard as any percussive track can ever dream. If the temple at the end of the universe were designed by Gaudi, its aisles measured in kilometres and its entire focus, an exposed space above the alter where the final rip in space will occur – this would play, as millions of dignitaries assembled among the alcoves and observed the refolding of the universe’s expansive fabric.

Pechenga: Helt BortePechenga is Rune Lindbæk and Cato Farstad. The story goes that after recording this album in 2007 at Lindbæk’s grandmother’s house they self released the record in Norway where it sold 57 copies. Evidently one to found its way to Smalltown Supersound‘s Joakim Haugland because that label’s just re-released it. Thankfully. It’s an incredibly beautiful ambient work, full of a sense of infinite blank vistas and silent winter light. Where Thomas Köner traverses beneath the ice, here we often soar above, watching our perfect black shadow dance along the white sheets below.

The Advisory Circle: As The Crow Flies The cracks in our memory have always been open to the sounds produced by Ghost Box and 2011 was no exception with As The Crow Flies providing those fleeting glances out the corner or your eye of something not being quite right. Pastoral electronica pushed by undercurrents of the other side.

Peepholes: Tunnels Having lapped up their last EP on Upset the Rhythm and it’s epic closer Carnivore we feel suitably prepped for the increasingly wide pendulum swings by the band, out and away from short bursts of kinetic drum/keyboard frenzy. New mini-LP Caligula opens with another long builder, a Mayan temple of an incline up to a plateau of the breathtaking and bloody.

It’s 3rd track Tunnels that stands out. Synths are no longer ripped apart oscillation by oscillation as they struggle against voice and drums. Instead they’re allowed to form the stem of Tunnels with an honest to god drum machine as accompaniment. They drift over plains and open up blue/black vistas for Katia’s mesmeric sing/chanting to roam. There are minor traces of early Techno floating around but these could well be the shadows of Techno’s own progenitors: the electronic minimalism of your pick of Cold-Wave bands.

Bubble Club: the Goddess A balearic hymn to an unnamed Goddess that masters the art of gentle euphoria so completely, combines cosmic-disco tropes with such loving care, that it becomes, by the end of its seven minutes, one of the most moving things we’ve heard in a long time. Synth stabs, co-opted African rhythms, cooing male vocals under waves of arpegiated bliss: Bubble Club’s The Goddess is one of the very reasons we write this blog and we can’t praise it higher than that.

The Stepkids: The Stepkids So your kid brothers stole your Hall & Oates tape that had Sly & The Family Stone on the other side, and got confused as to which was the cool in ‘Mojo’ terms side, cos lets face it you didn’t really know either. Dam-Funk produced the entire resulting jam and stuck it out on Stone’s Throw records. Yeh – this is kinda what happend.

Mushy: Faded Heart Faded Heart is the field recording of a night of slo-mo psychic bloodshed at a crumbling coliseum, a debut of uncanny mystique and ghostly enigma accomplished beyond the glummest dreams of most drag apprentices. It drenches pages torn off Zola Jesus’ grimoire in the thick waters of the swamp where Christine Baxter drowned, deep in the woods of a death country shrouded in thick ambient mist, roamed by shapeless beasts of Lynchian provenance.

Cult of Youth: S/T If Songs:Ohia read All the Pretty Horses, then Cult of Youth are into Blood Meridian. They make Appalachian black magic, a satanic barn dance where the damned spin in dervish-like abandon over pagan symbols carved with Bowie knives. ou can almost see the bald and sweating dome of the Judge towering above the filthy scalp-hunters, an archetypical Dionysian troubadour which recurs through the ages – Flipper, Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Country Teasers, GG Allin, now this – to enthral us with tales of beautiful massacre. They are doing it so that we don’t have to, and we owe them for that.

Drums Off Chaos and Jens Uwe Beyer: Magazine 3 In Magazine 3, Drums off Chaos (Jaki Liebezeit’s percussion ensemble) and Jens-Uwe Beyer channel the millennial wisdom of a shaman who stares into the sky and sees the future instead of the past, because the gods are up there, and through the rituals codified in this music, the tribe eventually becomes them. It evokes an alternative branching in the life-story of Gang Gang Dance, where, after God’s Money, they decided to kneel at the altar of DRUM with the Boredoms, instead of trotting down the shining path to become the best dance music band in the world.

Way Through: Arrow Shower Way Through capture the joy of the elusive English sun breaking through a sky which gives and takes away, to shine upon the communal procession by which the years are counted. It is rather fitting that it is Chris and Clare who are behind it, seeing as their wonderful London happenings bristle with the unfakable communitarian spirit of the true, archetypical festival.

Prince Rama: Trust Now Trust Now is a prodigy of exo-transformation. Upon slipping into it, we witness the world around us shape-shift. Boarded up shops become desecrated temples, malls are replaced by golden Ziggurats. Where not a minute ago stood gaudy theatres peddling crass pantomime, we now see impossible coliseums premiering Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest psyche-drama. Fractured glimpses of the alternative present that would have been if the high and beautiful wave had never broken.

Yacht : Shangri-La You don’t get many concept albums in these days of the mp3 download but Yatcht’s second album as a duo – Shangri-la – is a concept album in the very old school sense. Unlike Rick Wakeman’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table On Ice Yatcht’s Shangrila is less of an exercise in self indulgent wank, and more of an exploration of their record collection. No matter what you feel about The Gaia hypothesis it’s difficult not to feel a little more like we need some earthly care and fun while listening to Shangri-La.

Ga’an: Black Equus and S/T album Ga’an are a steel Hydra coiling and snapping from the undifferentiated sludge of contemporary music, an enigmatic troubadour staying for a night at the inn of this reality, regaling us with uncanny ballads about the chaos without so that we can writhe in gorgeous nightmares when we go to bed. They take off like Magma, into the heart of darkness like Goblin.

The Haxan Cloak: S/T The Haxan Cloak suck us in into a vortex which is Edgar Allan Poe Northern Sea dirge and modern composition drone, also the dark cave where pre-human tribes developed their first myths, which in a barely evolved form haunt us to this day. Like the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, if directed by Lucio Fulci.

Made Do and Mend Finders Keepers consistently release fantastic records, no mater what year it is. This year, like many uk independents, they suffered badly after a fire in the distribution warehouse of PIAS. The make do and mend compilations were issued to alleviate this situation, and turned out to be one of our favorite compilations of 2011.

Bad Passion: Liquid Fire This is music bought into at both ends. The wry smile of an angelic voice crooning “it’s really got me buggin’” is married to an elaborate sexual metaphor involving badminton — but at the same time the music does that transporting thing, like Low or Galaxy 500 (when you concentrated on the voice and let the guitars fade away). A transporting thing that makes you fall in love with the heartbreaking sound while simultaneously being entertained by the knowing sexual intent of the words.

And finally…

A huge shout out to our prodigal son at Tri Angle. Righty cleaning up on the ‘best of…’ lists wherever they appear. Afraid of the spectre of nepotism we probably don’t cover the output of the label as much as we should but releases from Balam Acab and Water Borders would make anyone’s list. Interesting times in 2012 as Robin follows in the footsteps of Kode9, Gas and Dub Narcotic Sound System and starts putting out his own music. If its anything like the lineage above, we’re psyched.

Logarhythmic

Been wanting to use this image by TagliaMani for a while — thanks to the ever wonderful 50 Watts.

Quickly (in 20JFG time*) following on from last week’s post about Peepholes‘ laboratory-fresh detour, Tunnels, comes the Moon Gangs remix.

Combining a decaying Techno drum sequence — seemingly heard from beneath midnight-black ocean waves — with reconstructed Chi-House synth hooks, Tunnels is turned from a cyclopean night drive into something (even) more cosmic. Which you’d expect from Moon Gangs. Katia’s vocal forced into a distant endless loop forming a hymn in some celestial cathedral that’s incrementally more disturbing as its grove remains locked. The remix ends with a final breakdown that’s soaring and trembling and extremely delicate all at once; anchored with reverb heavy handclaps: an archeological reconstruction of pop played at entirely the wrong speed.

Cabaal are part of a thankfully pretty strong tradition of incredible records dropping, unheralded, into our inbox. We do our best to scan through everything that doesn’t get filtered away by the legions of autonomous (and often rebellious) drones we’ve installed to keep the spam from the door. And quite frequently we’re rewarded with records as good as Cabaal’s Light Pollution.

Light Pollution’s final track is called SOMA and it’s beautiful in a way Balam Acab’s Sea Birds (Sun) is beautiful.

Inescapably drawn to the points of critical comparison that orbit the mutant strand of modern music that Tri Angle have curated: this is vast, emotive music that owes as much to chopped and screwed epics as it is indebted to minimalist electronic compositions.

SOMA oscillates its way into being; gorgeous synth waves washing over a blank landscape. Larger structures slowly appear: towers that provide some perspective. Chimes orbit them, drifting and darting around them like playful spectres. A bass throb rises up (relatively briefly) to clear the way for a vast, tape delayed procession to pass between our synthetic towers — both beat and vocal slowed to a narcotic drawl. A plaintive torch song just about visible among all the temporal remapping. And then the pixilated echo of a rave turns up and everything goes sublime.

A Slap Sideways into the Sublime

We’re all for returns at 20JFG and friends of the family Peepholes have made many, many returns to us over the years. Like prodigal siblings returning to our bleak and unforgiving farm to be subjected to biblical metaphors…remorselessly.

Having lapped up their last EP on Upset the Rhythm and it’s epic closer Carnivore we feel suitably prepped for the increasingly wide pendulum swings by the band, out and away from short bursts of kinetic drum/keyboard frenzy. New mini-LP Caligula opens with another long builder, a Mayan temple of an incline up to a plateau of the breathtaking and bloody.

But it’s 3rd track Tunnels that stands out. Synths are no longer ripped apart oscillation by oscillation as they struggle against voice and drums. Instead they’re allowed to form the stem of Tunnels with an honest to god drum machine as accompaniment. They drift over plains and open up blue/black vistas for Katia’s mesmeric sing/chanting to roam. There are minor traces of early Techno floating around but these could well be the shadows of Techno’s own progenitors: the electronic minimalism of your pick of Cold-Wave bands.

And then the breakdown. A unexpected trip into some sort of robo-exotic take on Popul Vuh; a slap sideways into the sublime before darting back to the almost EBM-step of the song proper.

Grapefruit, in marked contrast to Peepholes, makes it debut on these pastel pages (until a redesign trolls this archived post).

Gorgeous waves of oscillation initially come on like a time capsule of minimalism; a call and response to Spiegel and Riley — after sounding for all the world like a lost section of Vangelis’ Bladerunner score to begin with. The soft electronic kick moves things forward almost imperceptibly: a quantum monorail to Peepholes’ night drive.

Phase Accidents becomes all about the glide: a million airbrushed geometric shapes reconfiguring themselves in slit-scan patterns, dominating the windows that constrain and constantly reconfigure your field of view. A sort of proto-Balearic-Disco: a Chariots of the Gods to Lindstrom’s Gulfstream dreams.

20jazzfunkgreats best of 2010: Friends & Family Special

We close out 2010 with a series of shout outs to the great and the good that have a special bond with 20JFG. From guest writers who’ve put out spectacular albums to alumni that have hopped the fence and started their own labels, with this post we salute you because we love you and we kinda’ feel all proud about what you’ve gone and done. 20JFG doesn’t do nepotism. If we did you’d see through it a mile off for we would present the damning mp3 proof with every post. So, this isn’t an infected zone of back slapping, this is a collection of music that would have slotted neatly into the other sections (free-form as they are) but we thought, if anyone’s going to cast aspersions on these picks we may as well make a big song and dance about it. Guns blazing, at it were.

It’s appropriate then that, a year on from his last words for 20JFG (helping us collate last years lists in fact) we begin with Tri Angle records. Arriving at our black gates in 2007, Robin strung together the gothic folk soundtracks of Luboš Fišer with the necro-bass of early Cassie – a genre agnosticism that we hold very dear in the 20JFG citadel. Tri Angle began their vinyl life with the Balam Acab 12″ which ends with one of the most beautiful pieces of music we’ve heard all year.

This year was also the first full year of operation for the label owned by half of 20JFG: Hungry for Power. We managed to get our act together long enough to put out two disparate 12″s from two disparate duos.

Peepholes are Brighton/London pair Nick and Kat who kindly gave us three tracks to form the A-side of the Lair EP which we then invited people to remix for the B. This is what we said about E*Rocks remix:

E-Rock slows it down into some sort of amaze communion of tribal stomping and holy riffarama which comes across like Gang Gang Dance and Fucking Champs massacring Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, literally banging.

And finally, we journey to the land of occasional contributor Taraka Larson. Prince Rama of Ayodyha had been featured in these pages long before Taraka started contributing (indeed their inclusion was how she started contributing) which, in all fairness, should have prepared us for the tidal wave of drum centric synth infused psychedelic landscapes that unfurled from within the Shadow Temple LP.

Which is a wonderful way to end the year. If you’re in Brighton come party with one of us here. If you’re not, have fun doing whatever it is you’re doing. We’ll be back in 2011.

Post script:

We’ve stuck here to people that have written on these dark pages this year or who we’ve worked with so directly it’d be absurd not to include. There are vast, vast swathes of the other lists that — hoping we were not being too presumptuous — we’d consider ‘friends and family’ of this shuffling electronic zine. We salute you all and eagerly anticipate devouring your 2011 wares…

A Faust for the Senses

We have a storied history with Brighton/London duo Peepholes. One of the founders of 20JFG makes music with Nick from the band as Thee Four Horsemen, a label run by some of us put out an EP by them and they’ve been friends of the hive mind for many years. So we’re completely biased in their favour. But then, this entire endeavour is based on a series of interacting biases. An objective blog would be rather dull, no? Not to mention the veracity of our claims is a mere click of the play button below…

That paragraph of full disclosure out of the way, we return to the fun stuff.

Carnivore is an epic by Peephole’s standards: seven minutes of whirling crushed drums and frantic synths scrambling for their lives. The reverbed synth that underpins the celestial opening stalks through this track, constantly looming, orchestrating – a spectral presence that knits together the ascension of the cacophony as the motorik destination comes into view. These red-lining drums fall over themselves as they hurl forward in a fair impression of a what, in a revelatory moment, sounds like House – admittedly, half glimpsed House: dance music’s ghost flickering among the red-lined bars. Until it dies. It all dies, the utter destruction of the last minute unleashing god knows what upon a masochistic world. Divine.

Carnivore is taken from Peepholes’ latest release for the excellent and much covered-in-these-webpages Upset the Rhythm. The release itself is a split LP with APATT and should be out at some point in August. More info here.

A mere few days after we visited Hotel Mexico‘s delicate looping guitar cascade, It’s Twinkle, we were contacted by Nites and provided with their subdued, almost industrial remix. Here the source’s suggestions of Jesus and Mary Chain via proto-House are re-calibrated to throw the force of that reverbed guitar in the direction of something harsher, more resigned.

Strange what spaces are created by the judicious application of reverb: what was once delicate, cascading beauty is now the blue streets of dawn, Springsteen-ian heroes, hands in jacket pockets, moving along ‘sidewalks’ the world’s weight temporarily shifted by the loneliness of early morning. Triumphant in its own strange way, the track becomes the coda to a deep struggle only barely glimpsed and mostly off-screen.

The Chap‘s absolutely gorgeous ‘b-side’ on new(ish) EP Even Your Friend is all drifting Spanish lilt in place of the band’s usual clipped English (itself an anachronism in a sea of transatlantic drones). Written by the band for a German filmmaker who couldn’t get the rights to a Robert Wyatt cover of a Cuban love song the providence belies the beauty. Or maybe an English band writing and recording in a language they’re not proficient in, for the soundtrack of a German film that would go on to screen in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, is the perfect formula. Either way, for the non Spanish side of the 20JFG mind, this yearning and actually rather rousing love song will fill many a nostalgic dream for boss nova pre-sets and wall size sunset prints – a facsimile of equatorial romance but perhaps more affecting for it.

Ill Defined Seasons

Like a colossal bird emerging from Darwin’s Egg, spring spread its golden wings across our fair seaside city yesterday, an inverted Phoenix, bringing everything around it back to life. Gentle breezes flicking through the narrow streets, blowing away the cloak of grey that accumulates in winter’s dormancy. Rays of light, in training, waiting to ambush, with nostalgia for moments past with friends and beer and battered stereos only temporarily avoiding the urge to consume your precious tapes. For in our ill defined seasons this weather-purgatory seems at last ready to give way to the hazzy bliss of summer. And as before (after the tapes but before today) Mi Ami are back to amplify that hazzy bliss of summer with gentle waves of building distortion.

Dreamers rolls around in the dirt of teenage nights spent in suburban back gardens, the battered wooden fences dividing you from the worlds of possibility beyond. Feral, half glimpsed in the blue/orange night, stalking your periphery with hints of reckless futures. A growing crescendo calling out across decades of electric guitars, rusting in the salt heavy sea air.

Like some totem of Balearic bliss Maxxi & Zeus pre-empted this welcome herald of warmer times by dropping their new 12″ for International Feel through the portal. Deliriously and unashamedly ambient The Struggle stands with its back to the lapping waves of dusk facing forward, into the dark forest on the edge of the beach. The tension and release of shaken percussion forming the spine to synth cameos. The ghostly shell of Vangelis’s Deckard, blissfully washed ashore, lifespan ending, wishing he’d seen the Tannhäuser Gate. Eno’s Ambient works filling the atmosphere, paving the way for the quasi-self-help sample. Strangely unsure, self-deprecating yet eerily charismatic. Gloriously at odds with the simple natural beauty of the synthesised sounds that served as prelude.